All thinking people wish now to obtain at least some basic understanding of the deeper dynamics that underlie this sudden and stupendous metamorphosis: What are its true nature and significance? To what extent is…

‘A book is a mirror; if an ape looks into it, an apostle is hardly likely to look out.’ –G. C. Lichtenberg
‘The desire to go into politics is usually indicative of some sort of personality disorder, and it is precisely those who want power most that should be kept furthest from it.’ –Arthur Koestler
‘Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.’ –Thoreau
In this wonderfully entertaining collection of quotations, Simon Leys gathers insights and bons mots from a motley group of great artists, wits and thinkers. Topics range from ambition and adventure to youth, sex, time, toads, wine, faith and friendship.
Wise, witty and delightfully unpredictable, Other People’s Thoughts is for anyone who has ever rifled through a friend’s bookshelves or snuck a peak over a reading stranger’s shoulder. In this wide-ranging miscellany, we are given free rein to explore the nooks and crannies of one man’s mental library. By turns profound, whimsical and subversive, the result is a book-lover’s delight.

The Hall of Uselessness: Selected (sic) Essays (Black Inc, 2011)

The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays: Collected Essays

Simon Leys' cultural and political commentary has long been legendary for its profundity and acerbic wit. In The Hall of Uselessness his most significant essays are finally gathered together, on subjects ranging from China to Orwell, from Quixotism to the sea. Leys feuds with Christopher Hitchens, ponders the popularity of Victor Hugo and analyses whether Nabokov's unfinished novel should ever have been published. He dissects Mao's Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge, and discusses Waugh, Simenon and Confucius. He considers Chinese art, culture and politics, the joys and difficulties of lit.

Chinese Shadows

In response to:

To the Editors:
I am shocked by your recent articles on Vietnam and China, the likes of which one might expect to appear in Commentary or the Readers Digest. Apparently it is intellectually chic again to be anti-communist, especially in regard to third world countries.
The authors of both pieces had profound personal biases against their subjects. One of your readers has already pointed this out in reference to the Vietnamese piece (NYR, May 12). I shall therefore focus on Simon Leys’s China pieces (NYR, May 26 and June 9).
There is a proclivity among European intellectuals going as far back at least as Hegel to see China in terms of oriental despotism. It does not matter whether it is contemporary or historical China—it is all the same, there is always that terrible oriental despotism that the Chinese cannot escape. The most articulate of the twentieth-century European exponents of this point of view was Etienne Balazs. In a brilliant series of essays he argued that the Chinese had chances to escape oriental despotism through the Sung dynasty (end 1368). After that it has been all down hill. The weight of the past is such that contemporary China can in no way escape it—any revolution is a false one. Usually this view is derivative, as it was in Balazs’s case, of his own disillusionment with European politics and the left in particular. At bottom the Oriental Despotism view of China is Europe-centered. The genuine social and political revolution must come first in the West. Since it has not happened in the West, it is preposterous to talk of genuine revolution in such a place as China.
I shall be specific on three points.
1) Walls, the walls that Leys mourns so bitterly. Is it not just possible that city walls symbolize the oppression of the past to most Chinese? Both Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese hid behind these walls for decades—used as bulwarks against the guerrillas in the countryside. It was their custom also to put the ordinary inmates of these marvelously walled cities up against these walls and shoot them for some crime real or imagined. The heads of dissenters were displayed on these wonderful walls. And then there was the squatter housing squashed up against Mr. Leys’s walls.
2) Wang Shi-wei, the dissident who was shot in Yenan in 1947. True enough Wang was shot in Yenan in 1947 and Mao afterwards talked about it. What Leys fails to say is that Mao considered the execution a serious error which should not be repeated. In China, as elsewhere (even Europe), dissidents are persecuted, but they are rarely executed. In the 1950s we executed the Rosenbergs and today we publicly regret it. Eisenhower advocated executing American communists and we are embarrassed. Does this mean that Stalinist purges are the rule in either China or the US?
Perhaps your readers would be interested in Mao’s full statement in 1962 about Wang Shi-wei’s execution:

There was another man called Wang Shi-wei who was a secret agent working for the Kuomintang. When he was in Yenan, he wrote a book called The Wild Lily, in which he attacked the revolution and slandered the Communist Party. Afterwards he was arrested and executed. That incident happened at the time when the army was on the march, and the security organs themselves made the decision to execute him; the decision did not come from the Center. We have often made criticisms on this very matter; we thought that he shouldn’t have been executed. If he was a secret agent and wrote articles to attack us and refused to reform till death, why not leave him there or let him go and do labor? It isn’t good to kill people. We should arrest and execute as few people as possible. If we arrest people and execute people at the drop of the hat, the end result would be that everybody would fear for themselves and nobody would dare to speak. In such an atmosphere there wouldn’t be much democracy. [from “On Democratic Centralism” in Stuart Schram, ed., Chairman Mao Talks to the People (Pantheon, 1974), pp. 184-185]

3) It is well known that the diplomatic community in China lives an isolated existence and receives formal and bureaucratic treatment from the Chinese. The ordinary visitor is received in a much more friendly, relaxed manner—and often sees much more than the cloistered diplomat like Leys did. There are other foreigners living in China as well. Teachers, students, “experts,” and writers have a much less isolated existence and often a rather integrated life among the Chinese people. Has Mr. Leys ever met Sid Engst, Jim Veneris, Israel Epstein, and others like them in China? Their perspective on the foreigner in China is rather different than Mr. Leys’s, although not without problems and barriers (see for example the excellent book by David and Nancy Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside [1976], which revolves around the foreign community in Beijing).
No doubt Mr. Leys knows all this and that is what angers. His rigid preconceptions about the nature of past and present Chinese society and politics force a level of dishonesty which is unworthy of The New York Review….
Stephen R. MacKinnon
Tempe, Arizona

Simon Leys replies:

Mr. MacKinnon’s criticism bears on four questions. Let us discuss them in succession:
—Concerning Balazs: Etienne Balazs was a great scholar and an admirable man. That Mr. MacKinnon in reading my modest little essays should be induced to compare me with him fills me with a mixture of confusion and pride. (I doubt however if Mr. MacKinnon did understand Balazs’s writings any better than mine.)
—Concerning city walls: In underlining the fact that walls can symbolize oppression and that it was therefore right to pull them down, Mr. MacKinnon raises a very interesting point. Come to think of it—is it not a shame that, in a revolutionary capital such as Peking, quite a number of other (far worse) symbols of oppression are still allowed to stand: the Imperial Palace, the Summer Palace, etc.? Actually, in this respect, too many countries are still badly in need of a big clean-up: the London Tower, the Louvre, the Escorial, the Vatican, the pyramids of Egypt, etc., etc., are all awaiting the revolutionary intervention of Mr. MacKinnon’s pickaxe. If he intends to devote his energy to such a worthy cause, he has, without doubt, a most busy career ahead of him.
—Mao’s quotation concerning Wang Shih-wei: three points

“Mao deplored the execution of Wang Shih-wei.” Nixon too deplored his “plumbers” initiatives at Watergate. Great leaders are so often done a disservice by clumsy underlings!

“Mao opposes random killings.” This in fact was the only point on which Mao significantly departed from Stalin’s doctrine. Mao always agreed with the principle of Stalinist purges; only, to his more sophisticated taste, their methods appeared rather crude, messy, and wasteful. Mao eventually developed his own theory of the efficient way of disposing of opponents—which is expressed quite clearly in the fifth volume of his Selected Works recently published in Peking: executions should not be too few (otherwise people do not realize that you really mean business); they should not be too many (not to create waste and chaos). Actually before the launching of some mass-movements, quotas were issued by the Maoist authorities, indicating how many executions would be required in the cities, how many in the countryside, etc. This ensured a smooth, rational, orderly development of the purges. Some people see in this method a great improvement by comparison with Stalin’s ways. I suppose it might be so—at least from Big Brother’s point of view.

“Mao said that Wang Shih-wei was a secret agent working for the Kuomintang.” And Stalin said that Trotsky was a secret agent working for the Nazis. Later on it was also said that Liu Shao-ch’i was a secret agent working for the Americans. And that Lin Piao was a secret agent working for the Soviet Union. And now we have just learned that Madame Mao had been working for Chiang Kai-shek. Why not? After all there are always people ready to believe these things—Mr. MacKinnon, for instance.

—Other foreigners living in China: I do have a wide circle of acquaintances who have been, or are still, working in China in various capacities. I do also keep in close touch with a number of Chinese friends, former citizens of the People’s Republic, who know Chinese realities from the inside, a thousand times better than either Mr. MacKinnon or myself will ever do. If it had not been for the advice and encouragement I received from those persons who kept telling me that I was right on target, I would never have felt confident enough to publish these subjective impressions of China. On one point, however, I agree with Mr. MacKinnon: I too think it most unlikely that a person living in Peking, and being employed by the Chinese government, would ever express publicly his agreement with my views (though I know some who do so in private).

Pierre Ryckmans, 78, Dies; Exposed Mao’s Hard Line

ByMICHAEL FORSYTHEAugust 20, 2014

Pierre Ryckmans, who used the pen name Simon Leys, first traveled to China as a student in 1955. His once romantic view of China dissipated when he learned of the Cultural Revolution.

Pierre Ryckmans, a Belgian-born scholar of China who challenged a romanticized Western view of Mao Zedong in the 1960s with his early portrayal of Mao’s Cultural Revolution as chaotic and destructive, died on Monday at his home in Sydney, Australia. He was 78.

相关文章

Mr. Ryckmans, who was better known by his pen name, Simon Leys, fell in love with China at the age of 19 while touring the country with fellow Belgian students in 1955. One highlight was an audience with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. The man-made famine of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and ended about the time of Mao’s death, in 1976, were still in the future. There was much to be admired in the new China.

Yet pursuing his studies of Chinese art, culture and literature in the People’s Republic itself was not an option for a Westerner, so he settled in Taiwan, where he met his future wife, Han-fang Chang. He also lived in Singapore and Hong Kong.

It was in Hong Kong during the late 1960s, when it was still a British colony, that Mr. Ryckmans (pronounced RICK-mans) began to follow the turmoil just across the frontier, reading accounts in the official Chinese press about the Cultural Revolution and talking to former Mao supporters who had escaped it.

He began to find that the romantic view of Mao harbored by many Western intellectuals — as a progressive if flawed champion of the masses — was completely at odds with the cruelties of the Cultural Revolution, which sought to eradicate Chinese cultural traditions and Western capitalist influences and replace it with a Maoist orthodoxy. The movement led to purges, forced internal exiles and whipsaw shifts in the political winds, and it compelled Mr. Ryckmans to step into the arena of political commentary.

“Until 1966 Chinese politics did not loom large in my preoccupations, and I confidently extended to the Maoist regime the same sympathy I felt for all things Chinese, without giving it more specific thought,” Mr. Ryckmans wrote under his pseudonym in “Chinese Shadows,” which was first published in French in 1974. “But the Cultural Revolution, which I observed from beginning to end from the vantage point of Hong Kong, forced me out of this comfortable ignorance.”

His first account, “The Chairman’s New Clothes,” was also published in French, in 1971, a year after he had settled in Australia, lured by an eminent Chinese literary scholar, Liu Cunren, to teach at Australian National University. Mr. Ryckmans wrote the book under the name Simon Leys to disguise his identity so that he would not be banned from China.

He returned to China in 1972 on a six-month assignment as a cultural attaché for the Belgian Embassy in Beijing. The wanton destruction of the city’s ancient architectural heritage shocked him.

In “Chinese Shadows,” he wrote of his frantic search for some of the most magnificent of the city’s huge gates, which he assumed had been preserved, even though he knew that the city walls had been taken apart starting in the 1950s. The gates were gone. “The destruction of the gates of Peking is, properly speaking, a sacrilege; and what makes it dramatic is not that the authorities had them pulled down but that they remain unable to understand why they pulled them down,” he wrote.

The Cultural Revolution, he found, had destroyed the beauty of Chinese culture and civilization without destroying what needed to be exorcised: the tyranny of arbitrary rule.

In a telephone interview, Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister of Australia and a former student of Mr. Ryckmans, called him “the first of the Western Sinologists of the ’60s and ’70s to expose the truth of the cultural desecration that occurred during the Cultural Revolution, ripping away the political veneer from it all and exposing it for what it was: an ugly, violent, internal political struggle within the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao.”

Mr. Rudd added, “He was excoriated at the time by Sinologists who had been captured by the romance which many felt for the Cultural Revolution in the early days.”

The irony, Mr. Rudd said, is that the Chinese leadership moved to repudiate the Cultural Revolution after Mao’s death. Many of the delights of old Beijing — the food stalls, the street dancing on a summer’s evening — did indeed return, as did an appreciation for classical art, literature and, finally, the classical scholar Confucius, who had been vilified by the Maoists. Mr. Ryckmans translated, into English, the “Analects,” the collection of sayings attributed to Confucius.

Yet he did not change with the times. “It was difficult to get Pierre to accept that real, sustainable and positive changes had occurred in the China of the period of ‘reform and opening,’ ” Mr. Rudd said.

More than a Sinologist, Mr. Ryckmans was also a formidable European man of letters, earning doctorates in law and art in Belgium, said Richard Rigby, a China scholar and Mr. Ryckmans’s brother-in-law. His lectures, he added, brought the best of both worlds together.

“He could look at a Chinese painting or maybe something by Orwell and essays by Montaigne and put them all together into a coherent whole,” Mr. Rigby said.

Mr. Ryckmans also wrote a novel, “The Death of Napoleon,” which imagines the deposed emperor escaping from exile on St. Helena and making his way back to France. First published in France in 1986 and then in English in 1992, it was hailed as “an extraordinary book” by the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, writing in The New York Times Book Review, and adapted into a film, with Ian Holm and Hugh Bonneville, in 2002.

Mr. Ryckmans was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Le Monde and other periodicals and the recipient of several literary prizes.

He was born on Sept. 28, 1935, in Brussels. Besides his daughter, he is survived by his wife; his sons Marc, Etienne and Louis; and two grandchildren.

He also taught at the University of Sydney and spent his later years writing and sailing. A collection of his essays, “The Hall of Uselessness,” discussing topics as far-ranging as “Don Quixote” and Confucius, was published in 2011.

In “Chinese Shadows,” Mr. Ryckmans wrote that even though Mao and his acolytes would leave the scene, and there would be an inevitable relaxation of authoritarian rule, the fundamental characteristics of Communist rule would not change.

“Among various descriptions of Communist China made at different times, one may note differences,” he wrote, “yet if these descriptions have been made conscientiously and perceptively, they will show more than ephemeral journalistic truths, for modifications will be in quantity, never in quality — variations in amplitude, not changes in basic orientation.”